Modernist Miniatures. Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces, A. Huyssen

12 2.
Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots
of Urban Spaces
ANDREAS HUYSSEN
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.
?Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia
AT A REVEALING POINT IN RAINER MARIA RILKE'S THE NOTE

books ofMalte Laurids Brigge, written before World War I, in
the years 1904-10, the narrator, traumatized by metropolitan

life, laments, "Dass man erzahlte, wirklich erzahlte, das mufi vor
meiner Zeit gewesen sein" 'The days when people knew, really knew
how to tell stories must have been before my time' (Aufzeichnungen
844; Notebooks 146). A generation later, in the famous 1936 essay
"The Storyteller," Walter Benjamin diagnosed the end of storytelling
as the result of the destruction of experience in the trenches: "Begin
ning with the First World War, a process became apparent which
ANDREAS HUYSSEN is the Villard Pro
fessor of German and Comparative Lit
erature and founding director of the

Center for Comparative Literature and
Society at Columbia University. He is a
senior editor of New German Critique.
His books include After the Great Divide:
Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Indiana UP, 1986), Twilight Memories:
Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
(Routledge, 1995), and Present Pasts:
Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of
continues to this day. Wasn't it noticeable at the end of the war that
men who returned from the battlefield had grown silent?not richer,
but poorer in communicable experience?" What follows this rhetori

cal question is that well-known enumeration of destructive aspects
of modernity, ending with the cosmic vision of the "tiny, fragile hu
man body" beneath the clouds, "in a force field of destructive tor
rents and explosions" (143-44). The imagination of destruction took
a different form in Rilke's prewar text, but the crisis of traditional
experiences of time and space in the metropolis already pointed to

that of the battlefield: shock, violence, and anonymous death per
Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imagi
vade the early pages of Rilke's novel, and they affect its narrative
form. Already the first sentence of the novel has this to say about
Paris: "So, also hierher kommen die Leute, um zu leben, ich wiirde
naries in a Globalizing Age, is forthcom
eher meinen, es stiirbe sich hier" 'So this is where people come to
Memory (Stanford UP, 2003). An edited
volume on Third World cities, entitled
ing from Duke University Press.
live: I would have thought it is a city to die in' (709; 3).
? 2007 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 27
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28 Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces PMLA
With Malte, Rilke turned to prose be

cause his ability to write poetry seemed to
have abandoned him. Thus the narrator's re
flections on poetry: "Denn Verse sind nicht,
wie die Leute meinen Gefuhle (die hat man

fruh genug),?es sind Erfahrungen" 'Poems
are not, as people think, simply emotions
(one has emotions early enough)?they are
experiences/ But what is experience? Malte
continues: "Urn eines Verses willen muss man
viele Stadte sehen, Menschen und Dinge ...

Man muss zuriickdenken konnen an Wege in
unbekannten Gegenden, an unerwartete Be
gegnungen und an Abschiede, die man lange
kommen sah" 'For the sake of a single poem,
you must see many cities, many people and
Things-You must be able to think back to

streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unex
pected encounters, and to partings you had
long seen coming....' Writing poems also

requires a wealth of memories. But, as Malte
writes, "Und es geniigt auch noch nicht, dass
man Erinnerungen hat. Man muss sie ver

gessen konnen, wenn es viele sind, und man
muss die grosse Geduld haben, zu warten,

dass sie wiederkommen" c[I]t is not yet enough
to have memories. You must be able to forget

them when they are many, and you must have
liber mich hin. Eine Tiir fallt zu. Irgendwo

klirrt eine Scheibe herunter, ich hore ihre
grossen Scherben lachen, die kleinen Splitter
kichern. Dann plotzlich dumpfer, eingeschlos
sener Larm von der anderen Seite, innen im
Hause. Jemand steigt die Treppe. Kommt.

Kommt unaufhorlich. 1st da, ist lange da, geht
vorbei. Und wieder die Strasse. Ein Madchen
kreischt: Ah tais-toi, je ne veux plus. Die Elektri

sche rennt ganz erregt heran, dariiber fort, fort
uber alles. Jemand ruft. Leute laufen, uberho

len sich. Ein Hund bellt. Was fur eine Erleichte
rung: ein Hund. Gegen Morgen kraht sogar

ein Hahn, und das ist Wohltun ohne Grenzen.
Dann schlafe ich plotzlich ein. (710)

To think that I can't give up the habit of
sleeping with the window open. Electric trol
leys speed clattering through my room. Cars
drive over me. A door slams. Somewhere a

windowpane shatters on the pavement; I can
hear its large fragments laugh and its small
ones giggle. Then suddenly a dull, muffled
noise from the other direction, inside the
house. Someone is walking up the stairs: is
approaching, ceaselessly approaching: is

there, is there for a long time, then passes
on. And again the street. A girl screams, Ah,
tais-toi, je ne veux plus. The trolley races up

excitedly, passes on over it, over everything.
the immense patience to wait until they re

turn' (724; 19-20). It sounds very Proustian
avant la lettre, to be sure, but Proust's heroic
Someone calls out. People are running, catch

up with each other. A dog barks. What a re
lief: a dog. Toward morning there is even a
rooster crowing, and that is an infinite plea
achievement of grounding narrative one more
sure. Then suddenly I fall asleep. (4-5)
time in the remembrance of things past eludes
Malte. Malte's attempt to regain a lost form For Rilke, an extended sense of orderly spaces
and times is no longer to be had. Experience
of experience, the one that can be rendered
itself is in an epochal crisis, as Benjamin
as Erzahlung cstory,' shipwrecks. The coher
ence^ the novel form disintegrates into frag
ments, mere Aufzeichnungen, sketches that
soon even lose their temporal moorings in

the diary form. The novel begins with a series
of miniatures focusing on perception and its

disorientation. The second miniature reads:
claims, and this crisis affected Rilke's writing
of both poetry and narrative.1
Rilke's and Benjamin's suggestion that the
age of storytelling had ended has nothing to

do with the nostalgia of which both authors
have often been dismissively accused. The di
agnostic premonitions underlying this alleged
Dass ich es nicht lassen kann, bei offenem Fen

ster zu schlafen. Elektrische Bahnen rasen lau
nostalgia were thoroughly misconstrued. As a
tend durch meine Stube. Automobile gehen
not understood. Although Benjamin seems
result, their novel kind of writing practice was
i22.i Andreas Huyssen 29
to theorize the loss of storytelling in his essay
these texts are fairly well known. All the more
"The Storyteller," it is much more interesting to
puzzling is the absence of any broader critical
read his literary endeavors in Einbahnstrasse,

Berliner Chronik, or Berliner Kindheit as the
analysis that attempts to read this whole body
modernist transformation of an older type of
Erzahlung. Instead his literary prose pieces
were read as autobiography, while Rilke's

Malte was absurdly read as a bildungsroman
of writing as a central phenomenon of mod

ernism. The modernist miniature as a specific
mode of writing may indeed be more central
to the new in literary modernism than the
novel or poetry.
rather than a city novel in fragments. The diffi
culty was to properly name this new form that
exceeded traditional generic descriptions such

as Kurzprosa, aphorism, fragment, sketch, re
citpoetique, poeme en prose, parable.
Rilke's writing practice in the Notebooks

is important for my argument in yet another
sense. It couples the breakdown of the tempo

ral dimension of erzahlen 'to narrate' and the
spatial aspect of erfahren 'to experience' with
a foregrounding of vision and the legibility
of urban space. The narrator in Edgar Allan
Poe's Man of the Crowd introduces that ur
ban allegory with the German words "Es lasst
sich nicht lesen" 'It cannot be read' (506; my
Historical Excursus
A brief historical excursus is in order here,
before I turn to the issue of the miniature
itself. The place of the restructuring of tem
poral and spatial perception, for which the
modernist miniature is an important field of
experimentation, is the metropolis at a time

when it was an island of modernization in a
society in which country and small-town life
were still dominant but losing ground?the

period of high modernism stretching from
Charles Baudelaire's Paris to Arthur Schnitz
ler's, Hofmannsthal's, and Krauss's Vienna
trans.). Malte's project in Paris, however, is
to the Paris of the cubists and surrealists; the
different. It is "learning to see" (Notebooks 6)

rather than to read or write ("Ich lerne sehen"
Berlin of expressionism, left-wing Dada, and

Brecht; and the Moscow of Sergey Tretyakov,
Sergey Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov.
Attempts to write the metropolitan city,
its seething chaos, its filth, and its miseries
as much as its exhilaration and exuberance,
were not new in 1900. We can think of Bal
[Aufzeichnungen 710]), even though writing

about seeing is what Malte ends up doing.
This first part of the Notebooks, writ

ten at the time when Franz Kafka began to
develop his early experimental prose and

when Robert Walser wrote many of his urban
newspaper feuilleton pieces, remains central

to the trajectory of the modernist miniature
as a minor genre attractive to poets, novelists,
and philosophers in subsequent decades. In
zac's Paris, Dickens's London, Engels's Man

chester, or Dostoevsky's Saint Petersburg:
their texts present us with earlier fictional
and sociological reflections on urbanization
and modernization. But it is enough to com
German and Austrian literature, modernist

miniatures flourished in the first three de
pare these novels or Theodor Fontane's Berlin

novels, written as late as the 1880s and 1890s,
cades of the twentieth century, in Hugo von

Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Walser, Robert Musil,
Gottfried Benn, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Jun
with Rilke's Notebooks or the modernist city

novels by James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and
ger, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, Walter

Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, as well as in
Alfred Doblin to realize that something fun

damental changed in the literary representa
tion of social space in the city. The modernist
lesser-known authors such as Peter Altenberg,
miniature enters our discussion as a specific
Alfred Polgar, Franz Hessel, Mynona, and
feuilleton form that departs in significant

ways from those earlier city narratives.
Walter Serner. Among Germanists, many of
Something else must be said about the

genealogy of what I call the modernist min
iature. Short prose forms existed well before
1900. Consider the aphorisms of the French
moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries or of Georg Lichtenberg's Sudel

biicher; the fragments of the Jena Romantics;
forms such as the anecdote, the calendar or
almanac story, the epigram; and all those

short notices, sketches, and observations pub
lished in newspapers and feuilletons since the
eighteenth century. Yet the modernist min

iature differs significantly from those other
short prose forms?though, not coinciden
postmodernism (Weimar surfaces, rhizomic

culture, minor literature, the culture of the
spectacle, etc.). We must resist such presentist
appropriation and back shadowing if we are

interested in the specificity and nonidentity
of cultural phenomena over time. It is pre
cisely because there is some truth to the argu
ment that something fundamental changed in
post-World War II modernity that we should
guard against such elisions of historical dif
ference. For after World War II, metropolitan
urbanity in the West invaded and saturated
all social space through consumerism, the
automobile, air travel, and mass communica
tally, the feuilleton turns out to be the me
tions. My hunch is that while short prose is
dium of preference for its writers.
still being written in various forms, we would
Attempts to define such Kurzprosa in ge

neric or poetic terms have generally not been
successful. My emphasis here is therefore not
on a genre poetics but on the brief trajectory
of a privileged form-content-medium triangle
have to look to other media and their effects

on our lives to determine whether or not the
perceptual regime of modernism has itself

been altered or transformed into something
new in our own time.
at a specific time and a specific place.2 The ir
ritating and exhilarating novelty of the me

tropolis at the end of the nineteenth century
and the immediately following decades must
be recaptured and historicized if we want to
understand how that crisis of perception gen
erated the modernist miniature as part of a
Rilke, I have argued, represents only one be

ginning of the metropolitan miniature, which
has its own genealogy with the Baudelairean
poeme en prose. As we know, modernism de
much broader process of the urbanization
veloped unevenly?it came earlier to Paris
of literature. Why did this new form, which

seems less bound than the novel or the mod
ern epic to a national culture, flourish so em
phatically in German writing? The flourishing
may have been an effect of the exceptionally
fast-paced late-nineteenth-century urban

growth in Vienna and Berlin as compared
with such older European cities as London
The Writing of Bilder
than to London or Berlin. Indeed, Baudelaire,
always the "Herold der Moderne" 'herald of

modernism,' as Adorno once called him (As
thetische Theorie 201; Aesthetic Theory 133),
anticipated much of what later came to be

known in German scholarship as Prosagedicht,
in France recit poetique as it evolved through

Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and Mallarme to the
and Paris, and it surely can be related to the
surrealists. But the prose fragments of Rilke's
collapse of the German and Austrian Empires

in 1918. But the specific crisis of perception
Malte are not really prose poems in the Baude

lairean sense. They lack Baudelaire's irony and
distance, coming much closer to the emphatic
that initiated a new relation to space and time,

as it is articulated in the modernist miniature
jamin, has now become history, nostalgia,
Ausdruckskunst that emerged with expres

sionism, its spatial disorientation, auditory
confusion, and disturbances of vision. They
cliche. All too often today the texts resulting
also differ in their coding of subjectivity (e.g.,
from this crisis are simply read as anticipating
Rilke's use of the diary form and of a fictional
from Kafka and Rilke to Kracauer and Ben
122.1 Andreas Huyssen 31
protagonist) from the postexpressionist min

iatures by such writers as Kracauer, Junger,
Benjamin, and Bloch. Some of this difference
results from the authors' differing discourses
(sociology, philosophy, literature) and genres

of writing (poetry or prose). But there is an
glyphic writing and mass cultural images in

Kracauer and Adorno. As such they are not
easily legible. The visual dimension disturbs
legibility, and the promise of linguistic trans
parency is denied in the complex texture of
ekphrasis, metaphor, and abstraction. Bild
other, perhaps more important, dimension.
is never meant here simply as a stand-in for
Something else had to happen to trans

form the prose poem into the modernist min
Gemalde 'painting' and its post-Renaissance
iature of the interwar years, which, together
identical to photography, understood as un

mediated realism. Remember the Benjamin
with the documentary, is one of the few genu
inely novel modes of writing created by mod
regime of perspectival visuality. Even less is it
ernism in its love affair with the feuilleton of
ian distinction between Bild and Abbild: only

Abbild refers to simple representation.
European newspapers such as the Neue Presse

in Vienna; the Neue Rundschau; the Frank
to Schrift-Bilder could be easily explained. Al
In a more pragmatic register, the recourse
furter Zeitung; and other dailies, weeklies, or

monthlies. When the Baudelairean tradition
ready since the later nineteenth century, the
of writing and reading the city merged with
signs, street signs, electric ads, the marquees
developments internal to philosophy?as
of theaters and movie palaces, Litfassaulen

(advertisement pillars), sandwich men, and
so on. And then there was the medium of
philosophy became ever more literary in the

aphoristic writings of such antisystemic phi
losophers as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche?the
streets of the metropolis were full of store
known as Denkbild 'thought image' (by Ben

jamin), Raumbild 'space image' (by Kracauer),
publication itself. Before being gathered in

book form under an overarching title, most
of these miniatures were published separately
in the feuilleton, an urban literary medium
that, as part of a newspaper, often combined
Wortbild 'word image' (by Hofmannsthal),
text and image.
prose poem shifted to a specific kind of highly
condensed short prose that has come to be
Korperbild 'body image' (by Junger), Bewusst
seinsbild 'consciousness image' (by Benn),

and simply Bilder 'images' and Betrachtungen
But such pragmatic observations fall

short of addressing the deeper question. Bilder
are typically two-dimensional and suggest
'observations' (subtitles in Musil's Nachlass

zu Lebzeiten [Posthumous Papers of a Liv
perspectival organization. It was, however,
ing Author]). The writing of such Bilder was
politan experience threw into turmoil. What
now a separate enterprise from the writing of
precisely perspectival viewing that metro

if all these modernist miniatures, described as
the novel or even, as for Rilke, the fictional
Bilder, account for a different organization of
diary. The recourse to the visual in naming
sensual, not only visual but also auditory and

embodied, perception that the metropolis gen
this literary form is striking, but it also poses
certain problems. All these Bilder come in

the medium of written language and thus
have to be read as Schriften 'writings.' They
play off the fundamental difference between
Schrift and Bild, attempting to strike sparks
from their confrontation in the miniature. As
erated? I propose that the advantage the Bild

offered to these writers lay in that a Bild, in
this more than visual sense, condensed the ex
tensions of time and space, compressed them
into an overdetermined synchronous image

that was significantly different from ambling
Schrift-Bilder 'scriptural images' they draw

description, sequential observation, or the
on the tradition of the hieroglyph, as Miriam merely empirical urban sketch. My reading of
Hansen has shown in her work on hiero
paradigmatic texts tests this hypothesis.
Let me dramatize a bit for argument's

sake. At stake with modernist miniatures
as form it is firmly grounded in the microlog
ical observation of metropolitan space, time,
was a profound transformation of the literary
and life at that earlier stage of moderniza
project that crossed the disciplining border

line between language and the visual, between
narrative and space, as it was codified in the
tion. If the modern epic in Moretti represents
eighteenth century in G. E. Lessing's Laokoon.
Rilke is only an early example here for this

largely undertheorized phenomenon within
modernism, the other side of what Franco
something like a national encyclopedia in the

form of a macroscopic fictional map, then the
modernist miniature in all its incredible vari
ety represents the microscopic condensation

of a metropolitan imaginary that never gels
into some encyclopedic totality.
Moretti has called the modern epic as distinct

from the novel.3 Much as the modern epic has
Schrift-Bilder, Photography, and
been neglected or domesticated by scholars,

the miniature has been seen as a minor genre
Architecture
at best by comparison with the heroic efforts
My examples for the modernist miniature fo
of the modern novel or the seminal cycle of
cus on certain crucial aspects of reading and
poems. And even where it has been recog
seeing the city that reoccur in many texts: the
nized as an important part of a writer's oeuvre
(Kafka, Junger, and Benjamin come to mind),

it is more often avoided than actually read.
feeling of terror emanating from space; the

loss of boundaries between private and public
space, living space and street space; the motif
As a specific historical form, the mod
oiLeere 'void' and Hohlraum 'hollow space';
ernist miniature emerges only in retrospect.

It has that in common with Moretti s modern
their excess of legibility. I give a double frame
epic. The authors who engaged in writing such
to my discussion, one frame taken from pho
genre. Thus Bloch, with his Spuren (Traces)
pose to read the modernist miniature as a
miniatures did not know how to name the

and sections of Erbschaft dieserZeit (Heritage
of Our Times) another major contributor to
this new mode of writing, lamented in a let
ter to Kracauer (June 1926), "Hatte man nur
einen Namen fur die neue Form, die keine
mehr ist" 'If only we had a name for the new

form, which is no longer a form' (Briefe 278;
my trans.). Robert Musil in turn, in a review
of Kafka's first book, Betrachtung, singles
the Schrift-Bilder of urban advertising and
tography, the other from architecture. I pro

snapshot of urban space and to see it as a field
of experimentation to test the validity of what
Siegfried Kracauer described in the 1920s as

"das neue Raumgefuhl" 'the new feeling of
space' ("Expose") and of what the architec

tural historian Siegfried Giedion at the same
time described as spatial Durchdringung 'in
terpenetration, overlapping' (Bauen 6; Build
ing 6) in modern architecture. The modernist
out Kafka's short prose and Walser's feuil
miniature can be shown to complicate the
leton pieces as the prototype of a new mode
commonsense understanding of the snapshot
of writing, which is however "nicht geeignet,
just as it reveals the threatening aspect of the
resists the laws of genre as much as systemic
new experience of space, which is absent in

Giedion's account of the programmatic, even
Utopian dimensions of building in glass, iron,
and concrete.4
philosophy or urban sociology, crossing the

boundaries between poetry, fiction, and phi
Snapshot at first sight suggests superfici

ality, reification of time, arbitrariness of the
losophy, between commentary and interpre

tation, between language and the visual. But
guiding concept to discuss the new modernist
einer literarischen Gattung vorzustehen" 'not
suitable to preside over a literary genre' (Mu

sil 1468; my trans.). The new form as antiform
image. It may also seem poorly chosen as a

regime of space, since photography remains
tied to the perspectival organization of space,
which is challenged and transformed in the
modernist miniature just as it is in modernist
ence in assessing the phenomenon of Durch

dringungas central to the experience of urban
space could be further explored. It is no coin
cidence that Kracauer meshes the two oppos
painting, paradigmatically in cubism. But it

is the temporal rather than spatial dimension
of the snapshot that justifies its usage here.
ing senses of the concept most interestingly.
After all, snapshots can be fundamentally
Among the writers I am considering, the

one with the arguably most astute sense of
urban space is Kracauer, who was trained as
an architect and studied with the author of
opaque and mysterious, resisting interpreta

tion. Think of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow
the Sociology of Space, Georg Simmel. Kra
Up and the photographer's frustration read
cauer serves as my main example. Space in his
ing his own snapshots, which seem to reveal a miniatures is typically triangulated. There is
murder he actually did not see. Any snapshot,
concretely described architectural and urban
as Roland Barthes has taught us, may have its
space such as the hotel lobby, the renovated
punctum, the dimension of the photograph
arcade, a street in a Paris neighborhood, the
that eludes transparence, "that accident which Kudamm in Berlin, the roller coaster, the
pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to
unemployment office. Urban space is coded
me)" (27). The easy legibility of the snapshot here, long before Henri Lefebvre's seminal
is a myth. Similarly, the modernist miniature
seems easily legible, but more often than not

it resists facile understanding. Snapshots also
work, as social space, which is then textually

transfigured into a spatial imaginary or even
into dream space. In the miniature on the un
must be carefully read because, as Maurice

Merleau-Ponty once noted, any photograph
employment office, we read, "Die Raumbilder
holds open a specific moment that the rush of
ages of space are the dreams of society' (Kra

cauer, Schriften 5.2 186; my trans.). Deeply
influenced by Georg Lukacs's notion of the
transcendental homelessness of the modern
(lived) time would otherwise have immedi

ately closed (39). The snapshot marks the space
where the present turns into memory, but si
multaneously it preserves the appearance of a
sind die Traume der Gesellschaft" 'The im
presence.5 When transposed into writing, this
subject, Kracauer deploys this triangulation

to allegorize the fallen state of the world?at
unexpected eruption onto the scene of vision
first in rather metaphysical ways and later,
that Barthes called the punctum and Merleau
from the mid-1920s on, in sociological and

Ponty described in its temporal dimension Marxist ways (Mulder).
as the holding open of the moment in space
toward its present, its past, and its future al
lows for a palimpsestic writing of space, one

that transcends the seen and the scene and
Urban Space in Kracauer's, Kafka's, and

Benjamin's Miniatures
acknowledges the present and past imaginary
Let us take "Das Karree" ("The Quadran
any snapshot of space carries with it.
gle"), one of two pieces under the umbrella
As snapshots of space open up to the

passing of time, modernist miniatures articu
title "Zwei Flachen" ("Two Planes"), first pub

lished on 26 September 1926 in the feuilleton
late the new dynamic experience of space in
of the Franfkurter Zeitung and republished
Durchdringung. The literary texts in question
in Das Ornament der Masse in 1963 in the
here, however, articulate the negative side of
introductory section entitled "Natiirliche Ge
Durchdringung, its threatening, even horrify
ometric" ("Natural Geometry") (Das Orna

ment 12-13; Mass Ornament 38-39).6 There
ing dimension as experienced by the subject

lost in urban space. This fundamental differ
is absolutely nothing natural about this piece.
The accompanying miniature "Die Bai" ("The

Bay"), a piece about the harbor of Marseilles
that resonates strongly with "The Quadran
gle," makes it clear enough that the location is
the Mediterranean city. From the Kracauer

Benjamin correspondence we also know that
Kracauer named the quadrangle Place de

l'Observance, that "uncanny square we en
countered at night" (my trans.), as Benjamin,
remembering his Marseilles walks with Kra

cauer, writes after receiving a copy of the min
iature from Kracauer himself ("das Portrat

des unheimlichen Platzes, auf den wir nachts
stiessen"; Benjamin, Briefe 33). But the place
name is estranged to the abstract quadrangle,
and the name of the city is never mentioned.
The first sentence of the text contains a
punctum. "Nicht gesucht hat den Platz, wen
er findet" (Das Ornament 12). The transla
sea waste come smoldering out of open doors;
little red lamps lead the way. In the spaces

that afford a view, one finds improvised back
drops: rows of flying buttresses, Arabic signs,
stair windings. (Mass Ornament 38)
Then the quadrangle, "ein Karree, das mit einer
Riesenform in das Geschlinge gestanzt worden
ist" 'which has been stamped into the urban

tangle with a giant template' (13; 39), finds the
flaneur, who instantly becomes its prisoner. The
dreamlike spatial imaginary of the first sen

tences, with its reminiscences of urban scenes
in Hofmannsthal's Marchen der 672. Nacht, is

replaced by a different spatial regime:
Auf dem menschenleeren Platz begibt sich

dies: durch die Gewalt des Quadrats wird der
Eingefangene in seine Mitte gestossen. Er ist al
lein und ist es nicht. Ohne dass Beobachter zu
tion "Whoever the place finds did not seek it"
sehen waren, dringen ihre Blickstrahlen durch
does not quite capture the reversal of subject

and object as succinctly as the German does
die Fensterladen, durch die Mauern_Split

ternackt ist die Angst; ihnen preisgegeben_
(13)
(Mass Ornament 38). The meaning, how

ever, is clear: "He whom the place finds did
not seek it." The uncanny reversal of human
subject and urban space in the German sen
tence immediately disorients the reader. The
human subject becomes grammatical object;
the empirical object becomes grammatical

subject. The following sentences conjure up a
chaotic urban landscape, rife with putrefied
smells, red lights suggesting brothels, signs
in Arabic, and dreamlike, contorted archi
tectural space?the condensed imaginary of

Marseilles's infamous harbor quarter as sen
suous and sleazy labyrinth:
Ein Hintertreppenquartier, die Prunkauf
gange fehlen. Turen stehen offen, aus denen
graugriin der Geruch der Meerabfalle schwelt,
rote Lampchen weisen den Weg. An den

Durchblicken sind Versatzstiicke improvisiert:
Reihen von Schwibbogen, arabische Schriftta
feln, Stufengewinde. (Das Ornament 12)

A backstairs quarter, it lacks the magnificent
ascending entrances. Grayish-green smells of
On the deserted square something happens:

the force of the quadrilateral pushes the per
son who is trapped into its center. He is alone,
and yet he isn't. Although no observers are

visible, the rays of their gazes pierce through
the shutters, through the walls. . .. Fear is
stark naked, at their mercy. (39)
The further analogy to certain court scenes

in Kafka's Trial are obvious: "Ein Gericht tagt
auf unsichtbaren Sitzen um das Karree" 'On
invisible seats around the quadrangle a tri

bunal is in session.' The whole setup is a kind
of Foucauldian panopticon in reverse, but no

less oppressive for that. The quadrangle with
its military barracks, its "Horizontalen ... mit
dem Lineal gezogen" 'horizontal lines drawn
with a ruler,' and the "hundischem Gehorsam"
'canine obedience' of the wall, whose strangely
nonvanishing lines lead into the quadrangle,

represent the natural geometry of Cartesian
perspectival space (13; 39, 38). But instead of
liberating the subject's body and permitting

visual control over the environment, this ab
stract perspectival space exudes power and

domination, disciplining and surveillance.
Kracauer's agoraphobia, which Anthony
Vidler has so brilliantly analyzed, is not just
the fear of empty open spaces that dwarf the
subject and unmoor its perception; it is also

linked to the recognition of the disciplining
power of a rationalist and abstract regime of
The quadrangle, displaced (verschoben),
becomes a mise-en-scene in which the ob

servers take their position in a perspectiv
ally organized theatrical space. But is it the
natural geometry of the Guckkastentheater
'fourth-wall stage,' or do these observers look
inward from all four directions, as if in a
theater in the round?better, a theater in the
as subject of sensual perception. It is in this
square? The text remains enigmatic on this

score. But it suggests that the terror of the
invisible gaze of these observers overpowers
second sense that the quadrangle, rather didac
the subject in the center of the now worldwide
tically, is turned into an allegory of the state of
quadrangle, the "Quadrat ohne Erbarmen"
the world, in the concluding paragraph:
'square without mercy.' The cold geometry of

invisible gazes overwhelms the "soft, private
parts of the dream" ("Traumweichteile"), just
visuality that denies agency to the human body
Niemand sucht in dem Knauel der Bilder

gange das Karree. Seine Grosse ware bei pein
licher Uberlegung massig zu nennen. Doch
dehnt es sich, wenn die Beobachter auf ihren
Stiihlen sich niedergelassen haben, nach den

vier Weltseiten aus, erdriickt die armseligen
Traumweichteile und ist ein Quadrat ohne
Erbarmen. (13)
as the quadrangle wins out over the labyrin

thine "tangle of pictorial alleys" ("Knauel der
Bildergange"). The fate of the subject becomes
identical to that of the city. The condensation
of urban space into the allegorically read

quadrangle comes with an imaginary ex
pansion of the oppressive power of geomet

ric space across the world: natural geometry
quadrangle. After painstaking reflection, one without mercy. No need to point out how this
would have to describe its size as moderate. But
text translates the critique of rationalization
once its observers have settled into their chairs,
Weber's iron cage, if you will?into concrete
it expands toward the four sides of the world,
urban space and its imprisoning effect on the
In this tangle of pictorial alleys, no one seeks the
overpowering the pitiful, soft, private parts of
the dream: it is a square without mercy. (39)
The translation of "Knauel der Bildergange"

as "tangle of pictorial alleys" inevitably loses
the notion of the walking subject contained
in the neologism Bildergange 'image walks.'
Also note the move in German from the con
crete Karree to the abstract Quadrat. The

translation of Quadrat as "square" does not
render this move, since square in English sig
nifies both the geometric figure and the ur
ban square, while Quadrat refers only to the
geometric figure. This ending may strike the
reader as embarrassingly didactic. But the di
dacticism is itself thrown off track, estranged
by the comment about the observers settling
into their chairs. What observers? What
chairs? Where are we?
human subject. Indeed, Karree can be read

as exemplifying the dystopian dimension of
Kracauer's mass ornament itself.
A different form of spatial terror is de
scribed in "Erinnerung an eine Pariser

Strasse" ("Remembering a Parisian Street"
[Kracauer, Schriften 5.2 243-48]). The narra
tor in one of his strolls and in a state of mind
he calls Strassenrausch 'street euphoria, intox

ication' is lost in a side street unknown to him
in the proletarian Quartier Grenelle. Suddenly
a nightmarish perception overcomes him:

Aber nun geschah es: kaum hatte ich mich
von der weissen, ubertrieben hohen Theater
wand abgelost, so fiel mir das Weitergehen
schwer, und ich spurte, dass unsichtbare

Netze mich aufhielten. Die Strasse, in der ich
mich befand, gab mich nicht frei. (244-45)
But now it happened: hardly had I come de

tached from the white, excessively high wall
nicht acht gibt, blutend und zerfetzt, durch alle
Zimmerdecken, Mobel, Mauern und Dachbo
felt invisible nets holding me back. The street
den hinaufgerissen werden, bis oben auf dem

Dach die leere Schlinge erscheint, die meine
in which I found myself kept me captive.
Reste erst beim Durchbrechen der Dachziegel
of the theater, I had trouble walking on, and I
(my trans.)
He then sees several hotel signs without names
on derelict buildings, which suggest prostitu

tion. Stepping up to one of these hotels, the nar
rator suddenly becomes conscious of the fact
dass ich beobachtet worden war. Aus den

Obergeschossfenstern mehrerer Hauser sahen
Burschen in Hemdsarmeln und schludrig ge

kleidete Weiber auf mich nider. Sie sprachen
kein Wort, sie schauten mich immer nur an.
verloren hat. (Tagebiicher 567-68)
To be pulled in through the ground-floor

window of a house by a rope tied around
one's neck and to be yanked up, bloody and
ragged, through all the ceilings, furniture,
walls, and attics, without consideration, as if
by a person who is paying no attention, until
up on the roof the empty noose appears, hav
ing lost hold of what remained of me only as
it broke through the roof's tiles.
(Diaries 291; trans, modified)
Eine schreckliche Gewalt ging von ihrer blos
Here the miniature is condensed into one
sen Gegenwart aus, und ich hielt es beinahe
breathless sentence, at the end of which the
fur eine Gewissheit, dass sie es waren, die mir
die Fesseln angelegt hatten. Wie sie stumm

und reglos dastanden, schienen sie mir von
den Hausern selber ausgebriitet worden zu
sein. Sie hatten jeden Augenblick ihre Fan
narrator's body has been thoroughly disap

peared, leaving only the empty noose?a sur
real vision of an urban hanging that destroys
both human body and built space. The pas
Stuben hereinziehen konnen. (245)
sive voice points to the absence of an execu

tioner. Rather than provide protection and
shelter, the building has become a tool, if not
that I had been observed. From the upper
the agent, of the execution.
garme nach mir ausstrecken und mich in die
story windows of several houses, lads in shirt
sleeves and slovenly clad women were looking

down upon me. They didn't utter a word, they
just kept looking at me. Their mere presence
exuded a terrifying force, and I considered it
almost a certainty that it was they who had put
me in fetters. As they were standing mute and
motionless, they seemed to have been hatched

from the houses themselves. Any moment,
they could have stretched out their tentacles
The terror emanating from urban space
and the dreamlike contortion of space are

things Kracauer shares with Kafka, whose
novels he was one of the first to review for the
Frankfurter Zeitung in the mid-1920s. At the
same time, Kafka's Angst-Raume 'spaces of

anxiety' lack the social and philosophical lan
guage that characterizes Kracauer s rendering
of urban space, which, as a result, poses fewer
and pulled me into the rooms. (my trans.)
riddles to the interpreter. Yet reading these texts
If illicit sexuality and class anxiety
not simply a case of intertextual influence. Kaf
together makes it clear that we are confronting
combine in this surreal scene, a comparable
ka's and Kracauer's approaches to urban space
spatial situation appears in a more purged, ab

stracted, and more violent form in Kafka's di
aries, a rich source of modernist miniatures:
city had on its most astute observers.
are grounded in the similar effects the modern
I could go on and compare the spatial
terror as rendered in Kafka's and Kracauer's
Durch das Parterrefenster eines Hauses an ei
miniatures with texts by Ernst Junger from
nem um den Hals gelegten Strick hineingezo

gen und ohne Rucksicht wie von einem der
the capriccios in Das abenteuerliche Herz

'The Adventurous Heart.' Jiinger's example
could serve to take the argument one step
ness. Think of the disruptive ringing of door
further and to establish the analogy between

urban experience and war experience, a fre
quent topos in Weimar literature and paint
Or, for that matter, in Kafka's Trial. The house
bells or telephones in Benjamin's miniatures.

of the self in both senses caves in. It caves in
ing.7 In all three writers, the terror is sudden
because the boundary between the secure
and nameless, tied to the hidden power of ur
private space of the bourgeois interior and its

inwardness, on the one hand, and the public
ban space and its Durchdringung, literally the

penetration and overpowering of the subject.
space of the street and the city, on the other,
In Junger, however, the spatial threat serves to
is increasingly blurred?most famously in
strengthen the subject, to create the armored
Benjamin's analysis of the arcade as an inte

rior street space, which, like the dream, lacks
a proper outside.
body though Haltung, desinvolture ('posture,
bearing'), and what he calls the telescopic

gaze, whereas in Kracauer's and Kafka's texts
the borders between inside and outside, be
tween the subjective imaginary and objective
world, are constantly crossed, endangering

the coherence of the narrating or narrated,
observing or observed subject.
The extended scholarly discussion of

Schwellenerfahrungen 'threshold experi
ences' in Benjamin belongs in this context
as well (Menninghaus): thresholds not just
between interior and street life (think of the
all-important space of the loggia in Berliner
If the terror experienced by the sub

ject emanates mainly from outdoor urban
Kindheit) but also between dream and wak
space in Rilke, Kafka, Kracauer, and Junger,

it is not absent from the bourgeois interieur,
world and myth-laden underworld. The slight

elevation of the Schwelle 'threshold' on the
once celebrated as the space of privilege and

protection from an unfriendly and danger
one of the distinctive features of Berlin apart
ing, past and present, life and death, surface
floor separating one room from another was
ous outside. Thus in Einbahnstrasse, Benja

min speaks tongue in cheek of "Schrecken
der Wohnung" 'the horror of apartments'
ments in the old and new West of Benjamin's

time, but it is imbued in his writing with an
'fittingly houses only the corpse.' And: "Auf
subject-object relations and in the relation
allegorical dimension that exceeds any single

(88; One-Way Street 446). The arrangement
architectural, anthropological, philosophical,
of nineteenth-century furniture is to him or mythic referentiality.
"the site plan of deadly traps, and the suite
Time and again, miniatures by Benjamin
of rooms prescribes the path of the fleeing
and by Kracauer, as those by Rilke, Kafka,
Benn, and Musil, focus on this process of the
victims" (446). The bourgeois interior "wird
breakdown of the inside-outside division in
adaquat allein der Leiche zur Behausung"
diesem Sofa kann die Tante nur ermordet

werden" 'On this sofa the aunt cannot but
be murdered' (89; 447). Ten years later Kra
cauer took up the theme of indoor murder as
favorite topic of the boulevard press, but here
between private and public space. To different
degrees, all these writers read this breakdown
as a symptom of major historical change, not

just anticipating a new perception but also re
quiring a new organization of social life. More
the focus was the anonymous hotel room as

the space of murder sensationalized in the
than other literary genres, these miniatures
press (Schriften 5.3 293). In Benjamin's text,
sensibility in perceiving time and space. There
the bourgeois interior with all its furnishings,
is a certain logic of form in that Benjamin's

Proustian memory project, his Berliner Kind
heit um Neunzehnhundert, comes to us as a
potted nature, and collected knickknacks is

as subject to intrusions from the outside as is
the traditional bourgeois self and its inward
in their very form record and construct a new
carefully constructed montage of miniatures
rather than as an extended narrative in novel

or autobiographical form. In Berliner Chronik,
the Berlin montage preceding Berliner Kind

heit, Benjamin distinguished his project from
autobiography as a temporal form focusing
on "den stetigen Fluss des Lebens" 'the con
tinuous flow of life.' He continued, "Hier aber
ist von einem Raum, von Augenblicken, vom

Unstetigen die Rede" 'Here I am talking of a
space, of moments and discontinuities' (488;
Berlin Chronicle 612). Time gives way to space,
continuity to das Unstetige, the sovereign sur
veying gaze to the spatially isolating and frag

menting look through the magnifying glass,
as it were. Adorno's aphorism about the splin
'the new feeling for space' produced by the

development of technology and so far hardly
understood ("bisher noch kaum erfasst" ["Ex
pose"]). In his Frankfurter Zeitung review of
the Stuttgarter Werkbund exhibition of 1927
he emphasized the dissolution of traditional
perspective in urban housing, in interior de

sign (Loos comes to mind), and even in the
exhibiting of household tools (Schriften 5.2
68-74). In such comments on the new archi
tecture, he seems to approach the Utopian di
mension of architectural modernism, which
is largely absent from his literary miniatures.
Siegfried Giedion, in his 1928 work Bauen

in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisen
ter in the eye as magnifying glass captures the
beton, a programmatic statement about the
kind of vision that generates the writing of the
promises of modern architecture that was
modernist miniature (Minima Moralia 57).
Giedion and Durchdringung

If Durchdringung ofinside and outside, sub
ject and object, private and public space is

presented in the modernist miniature as
Angst-Raum 'space of anxiety' and Angst
Traum 'nightmare,' it took on entirely

positive, even Utopian connotations in the
architectural discourse of the 1920s. The idea
that space was central to modernist literature
is not exactly new. Yet it is important to re

member, since all too often in recent decades,
literary modernism has been discussed as

privileging time over space, whereas the
emergence of space as a key structuring factor
has been attributed to postmodernism, most

famously perhaps by Fredric Jameson. This
view shipwrecks on the modernist minia

ture (and not only there). We know that both
Kracauer and Benjamin were interested in

the new architecture and its Utopian visions
in the work of Paul Scheerbart, Adolf Loos,
Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies
extensively excerpted in Benjamin's notes for

his arcades project, describes this new spatial
experience with the multivalent term Durch
dringung, which opens up a new form of see
ing. According to the felicitous phrasing by

architectural historian Hilde Heynen, Durch
dringung "stands for a weakening of hierar
chical models on all levels?social as well as
architectural" (35). What appears as terroriz

ing spatial experience in the modernist minia
ture appears here as the liberatory dimension
of Durchdringung and a new understanding
of architectural space. Giedion writes:
Es scheint uns fraglich, ob der beschrankte
BegrifF'Architektur" uberhaupt bestehen blei
ben wird. Wir konnten kaum Auskunft iiber
die Frage geben: Was gehort zur Architektur?
Wo beginnt sie, wo endet sie? Die Gebiete

durchdringen sich. Die Wande umstehen
nicht mehr starr die Strasse. Die Strasse wird
in einem Bewegungsstrom umgewandelt.

Gleise und Zug bilden mit dem Bahnof eine
einzige Grosse. (Bauen 6)

It seems doubtful whether the limited con
van der Rohe, Lilly Reich, and many others.

Thus Kracauer, in an as yet unpublished piece
cept of "architecture" will indeed endure.
archived in his Nachlass 'literary estate' in

Marbach, spoke of "das neue Raumgefuhl"
belongs to architecture? Where does it begin,

where does it end?
We can hardly answer the question: What

Fields overlap: walls no longer rigidly de
fine streets. The street has been transformed
into a stream of movement. Rail lines and
trains, together with the railroad station,
form a single whole. (Building 90)
If architecture's realm is no longer just

that of built objects but also one of spatial and
social relations, as Giedion suggests, then one

could argue that the modernist miniature, de
spite its largely negative coding of Durchdrin
gung, is the literary analogue of this new way

of seeing and experiencing space. One would
then want to define the literary techniques
corresponding to architectural Durchdrin

gung as the intermingling of spaces through
the partial absence of floors (as for instance in
such nineteenth-century iron constructions

as the Eiffel Tower) or the interpenetration
of equivalent volumes that erase the borders
between them (Gropius's Bauhaus in Dessau).
This project could further draw on contem
porary suggestions such as Ernst Cassirer's,
"dass das Raumproblem zum Ausgangspunkt
einer neuen Selbstbesinnung der Asthetik

werden konne" 'that the problem of space
may become the point of departure for a new
self-reflection of aesthetics' (95; my trans).
I cannot perform here this task of trans
lating architectural Durchdringung into a

variety of writing strategies in the modern
ist miniature, but I hope my reading of Kra
cauer's "Quadrangle" in the context of other
miniatures has been suggestive of how one

might argue this point: the intermingling
of spatial mappings, urban space as social
space, the loss of the subject's firm stand
point, visual and bodily disorientation, fall
ing through missing floors as in Junger's "Das
Entsetzen" ("The Horror") or being pulled up

through ceilings as in Kafka, bodies of philo
sophical and descriptive text overlapping or
interpenetrating one another, and so forth.
Both architecture and literature reflect new
modes of seeing and experiencing space and
time, and as with the introduction of all new
technologies, the result is a mix of fascination
and terror.
Kracauer into Exile
Let me conclude with some broader com

ments on Kracauer's urban imaginary. Critics
have pulled his Stadtebilder 'urban images'

too much into the orbit of his philosophy of
history, which interprets the city exclusively
as emblem of alienation, ego loss, reifica

tion, and anomie, as the catastrophic space
of a modernity gone awry and overwhelmed
by abstract forms of empty time and empty
space. True, the notion of Leere 'emptiness,
void' appears frequently in his miniatures,
and it can be compared with Benjamin's no
tion of an empty homogeneous time or with
Bloch's characterization of Weimar's Neue
Sachlichkeit 'New Sobriety' as "Funktionen

im Hohlraum" 'functions in the void' (Erb
schaft 212; my trans.). But as the differentia
tion of spatial models in "The Quadrangle"

already suggested, urban space in Kracauer is
not coded exclusively as homogeneous nega

tivity. As Paris and Berlin provide the privi
leged spaces for his texts, one can note how
he differentiates between the two cities. The
street in Paris still functions as site of mem
ory and experience, while streets in Berlin

either scream with emptiness ("Schreie auf
der Strasse" [Schriften 5.2 207]) or undergo
such rapid architectural change that they no
longer hold any memory of the past ("Strasse
ohne Erinnerung" [Schriften 5.3 170-74]).
Berlin is seen as the decisive cauldron of mo
dernity in political and social crisis, while

Paris is described as a city of the past. The
modern world seems to be missing in Paris
in this perspective of the visitor from Berlin.
In "Pariser Beobachtungen" ("Paris Observa

tions" [1927]), Kracauer writes about France:
Die Gesellschaft dauert fort als habe sie den
Krieg wirklich gewonnen, man spricht uber
Kunst und Literatur wie in verschollenen
Jahrzehnten, Besitz und Mitgift stehen im
Geruch der Heiligkeit, und ihre Generale
sind echte Generale. (Schriften 5.2 25)

Society continues as if it had really won the
war. One speaks about art and literature as in
lost decades. Property and dowry exude an

odor of holiness, and their generals are au
thentic generals. (my trans.)
The visitor returns to Berlin "mit dem Be

wusstsein .. . dass er hier wieder die Luft
der rauhen Wirklichkeit atme, wie es heisst"
'conscious here of breathing the air of harsh
reality, as they say' (26; my trans.).
This harsh reality, however, harbors a po
litically promising contradiction, which Kra
before Kracauer turned to more sociologically
and politically inflected views. The descrip

tion of "Lichtreklame" 'electric advertising' of
1927 is very different:
Die Lichtreklame geht an einem Himmel auf,
in dem es keine Engel mehr gibt, aber auch

nicht nur Geschaft. Sie schiesst uber die Wirt
schaft hinaus, und was als Reklame gemeint
ist, wird zur Illumination. Das kommt davon,
wenn die Kaufleute sich mit Lichteffekten ein
lassen. Licht bleibt Licht, und strahlt es gar in
alien Farben, so bricht es erst recht aus den

Bahnen, die ihm von seinen Auftraggebern vor
gezeichnet sind.... Der Reklamespriihregen,

den das Wirtschaftsleben ausschiittet, wird zu
Sternbildern an einem fremden Himmel.
cauer has paradigmatically analyzed in the

well-known essay "The Mass Ornament." The
tension he developed there between the dys
topia and the Utopia of reason also emerges if
we compare the several miniatures that focus
on advertising. In "Langeweile" ("Boredom"

[1924]), Kracauer analyzes the historical de
cline of boredom as a creative mental state.
Here is what he writes about the flaneur walk
ing the street in the evening:
Da Ziehen leuchtende Worte an den Dachern
voruber, und schon ist man aus der eigenen
Leere in die fremde Reklame verbannt. Der
Korper schlagt Wurzeln im Asphalt, und der
Geist, der nicht mehr unser Geist ist, streift mit
den aufklarenden Lichtbekundungen endlos
aus der Nacht in die Nacht. Ware ihm noch ein
Verschwinden gegonnt! (Das Ornament 322)

Illuminated words glide by on the rooftops,
and already one is banished from one's own
emptiness into the alien advertisement. One's
body takes root in the asphalt, and, together
with the enlightening revelations of the il
luminations, one's spirit?which is no longer
one's own?roams ceaselessly out of the night
and into the night. If only it were allowed to
disappear. (Mass Ornament 332)
(Schriften 5.2 19)
Electric ads rise in the heavens that no longer

harbor angels but are not all commerce either.
They exceed economics, and what is meant as

advertising becomes illumination. Such things
happen when businessmen handle light effects.
Light remains light, and when it shines in all its
colors, it really breaks the bounds set by its con
tractors. ... The drizzle of advertising poured

forth by economic life is transformed into a
constellation in an alien sky. (my trans.)
Lichtreklame as uncontrollable excess

points to an alternative future to be read as a
Sternbild 'constellation' in an alien sky. Even
if overall the rhetoric is less apocalyptic than
in the earlier text, the form of the miniature
is much the same. It remains so until 1933, by
which time the dystopian vision has returned,
supported now by Kracauer's concrete obser

vations of social realities after the crash of
1929. In "Die Unterfuhrung" ("The Under

pass"), a miniature about a passage under the
rail lines at Bahnhof Charlottenburg, which
is always crowded with travelers, beggars, and
hawkers, Kracauer makes much of the oppo
This is still the subjective discourse of loss,
sition of the oppressive and unshakable iron

and concrete low-ceiling construction and the
human chaos of motion. Both, however, elude
typical of an antiurban German Kulturkritik,
any kind of human rational Durchdringung:
Unmenschlich ist aber nicht nur die Planlosig

keit, mit der die Menschen umhertreiben, son
dern auch die planmassige Konstruktion der

Passage_Ein System, das so undurchdrungen
und verlassen ist wie das anarchische Gemisch
der Passanten und Bettler. (Schriften 5.3 41)
Inhuman is not only the aimlessness, with

which people drift about, but also the planned
construction of the passage.... It is a system
just as opaque and forsaken as the anarchic
mix of passersby and beggars. (my trans.)

The Utopian dimension of Durchdringung,
articulated by Giedion before the crash, has

not been fulfilled. One of Kracauer's last Ber
lin miniatures, published just a couple of days
after its author left Berlin for good on 28 Feb
ruary 1933 to enter the extraterritoriality of

exile, describes the silent crowds looking at
the burnt Reichstag the day after the fatal fire:
2. This essay is a first attempt to describe the mod

ernist miniature as a central laboratory of urban litera
ture. In future work, I hope to expand the scope of this
investigation to include close readings of works by Kafka,
Musil, Benn, and Junger as well as by Benjamin, Bloch,
and Adorno. What has always intrigued me about this

specific mode of writing is that, in the wake of Baude
laire, it was practiced by most of the major modernists in
Germany and Austria as well as by the major representa

tives of German critical theory.
3. There is an extensive literature that discusses the
modernist city novel in terms of cinematic narrative and
technique. The relation of literary texts to photography
has been much less discussed. Focus on the modernist
miniature as Bild may help expand our understanding of

the relation between the literary and the visual domains
in modernism.
4. The central concept of Durchdringung has been lu

cidly described by Heynen (30-38).
5. A comparable argument about the temporality of

photography can be found in Kracauer's "Photography"
in Mass Ornament (47-63).
6. The following reading of Kracauer's miniature

owes much to Briiggemann's path-breaking Das andere
Fenster.
Die Blicke dringen durch dieses Symbol hin

durch, und tauchen in den Abgrund nieder,
che Herzy see Huyssen 127-44 ("Fortifying the Heart
den seine Zerstorung eroffnet. (211)
Totally: Ernst Junger's Armored Texts").
7. On Junger's short prose pieces of Das abenteuerli
The gazes penetrate and go through this

symbol, and they dive down into the abyss
opened up by its destruction. (my trans.)
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Gretel Adorno
In certain ways, "Rund um den Reichstag"

marks the logical, though not chronological,
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12 2.

Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.

?Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

AT A REVEALING POINT IN RAINER MARIA RILKE'S THE NOTE

the years 1904-10, the narrator, traumatized by metropolitan

erature and founding director of the

Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism

(Indiana UP, 1986), Twilight Memories:

Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia

(Routledge, 1995), and Present Pasts:

Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of

but poorer in communicable experience?" What follows this rhetori

experiences of time and space in the metropolis already pointed to

Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imagi

naries in a Globalizing Age, is forthcom

Memory (Stanford UP, 2003). An edited

volume on Third World cities, entitled

ing from Duke University Press.

live: I would have thought it is a city to die in' (709; 3).

? 2007 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 27

28 Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces PMLA

With Malte, Rilke turned to prose be

wie die Leute meinen Gefuhle (die hat man

viele Stadte sehen, Menschen und Dinge ...

Things-You must be able to think back to

long seen coming....' Writing poems also

man Erinnerungen hat. Man muss sie ver

muss die grosse Geduld haben, zu warten,

to have memories. You must be able to forget

liber mich hin. Eine Tiir fallt zu. Irgendwo

Hause. Jemand steigt die Treppe. Kommt.

vorbei. Und wieder die Strasse. Ein Madchen

kreischt: Ah tais-toi, je ne veux plus. Die Elektri

uber alles. Jemand ruft. Leute laufen, uberho

rung: ein Hund. Gegen Morgen kraht sogar

Dann schlafe ich plotzlich ein. (710)

drive over me. A door slams. Somewhere a

noise from the other direction, inside the

house. Someone is walking up the stairs: is

approaching, ceaselessly approaching: is

tais-toi, je ne veux plus. The trolley races up

the immense patience to wait until they re

Someone calls out. People are running, catch

achievement of grounding narrative one more

sure. Then suddenly I fall asleep. (4-5)

time in the remembrance of things past eludes

soon even lose their temporal moorings in

of miniatures focusing on perception and its

claims, and this crisis affected Rilke's writing

of both poetry and narrative.1

Rilke's and Benjamin's suggestion that the

age of storytelling had ended has nothing to

Dass ich es nicht lassen kann, bei offenem Fen

nostalgia were thoroughly misconstrued. As a

tend durch meine Stube. Automobile gehen

not understood. Although Benjamin seems

result, their novel kind of writing practice was

i22.i Andreas Huyssen 29

to theorize the loss of storytelling in his essay

these texts are fairly well known. All the more

"The Storyteller," it is much more interesting to

puzzling is the absence of any broader critical

read his literary endeavors in Einbahnstrasse,